Recent Modernist Blog Posts Page 2

Welcome to the Amazing Food Made Easy blog! This is a place I can share information and updates that don't fit into a specific area on the rest of the site. I focus mainly on sous vide and modernist cooking but if it's an interesting cooking method or fun cooking news I'll cover it as well.

In addition to cooking and sous vide news, how to guides and other articles, there's a lot of different types of information here including:

I really love good BBQ and I think this panel turned out to be my favorite. They had a great mix of viewpoints and while they all were coming from very different places they completely respected the opinions of the others. It made for a very dynamic panel as they addressed some heavy questions.

It included Jean-Paul from Blue Smoke, Susan Simmons from Birds & Bubbles, and Daniel Delany from Briskettown.

The What Heritage Means talk was fantastic and one of my favorites. All three panelists had different upbringing and got into cooking Heritage food in different ways. The moderator was Matt Rodbard, who wrote Koreatown (which I really need to get) and he did a good job moving the conversation around and getting everyone's viewpoint into the talk.

The panel included Suvir Saran from Tapestry, Joseph "JJ" Johnson from The Cecil and Esther Choi from mŏkbar. It was great listening to people with such passion for the food they are cooking. They also seem to view it as not just feeding people but educating them while celebrating a culture.

One huge benefit of living in Brooklyn is the easy access to events like this one, it was being held a few miles from my house. A negative is that you usually take the subway, and in late summer it's like a sauna down there. By the time my 30 minute trip was over I was dripping with sweat, not the best way to start off the conference. Luckily this first panel quickly made me glad I decided to attend.

This panel has some of the most innovative chef's in the city on it including Wylie Dufresne, Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske talking about the future of food and restaurants.

Some people say you need to pre-sear your food before you cook them sous vide. Other people say to sear afterwards. Some say to do both. What's the right answer?

Thanks - Harold

This is a great question and one that many people run into. I'll look at both sides of the question, whether to pre-sear and whether to post-sear. I'll start with the post-sear as it's the easiest to answer.

If you want good flavor and crust on your food, you will always want to sear it when it is done cooking. Even if you do a pre-sear, the crust itself will go away and can only be established by searing it after the sous vide process is over.

Whenever I cook pork or chicken I always brine it. Is this something I still need to do with sous vide? I've noticed most of your recipes don't use a brine.

Thanks - Samantha

Very good question! And the answer is "It depends"!

Traditionally, the brine was used as a way to maintain the juiciness of food, as well as to firm up the texture and introduce flavors. This is all still true in sous vide cooking, though it isn't as apparent because the sous vide-only result is so good by itself. We will break down brining into "meat" and "fish", since they are handled differently.

This is a detailed review of the Gourmia GSV130 Digital Sous Vide Pod, an inexpensive immersion circulator manufactured by Gourmia. Near the end of 2015 they released this low-cost immersion circulator which, when attached to a suitable container, will provide an excellent water bath for sous vide cooking. If you are interested in getting involved with sous vide cooking, this review will give you all of the information you need to determine if the Gourmia is the right immersion circulator for your needs.

Sansaire has just announced their KickStarter campaign for their next iteration of their immersion circulator, the Sansaire Delta. Their campaign has also been fully backed already, with more than 900 backers so there is no risk of it not being funded.

With several of the other brands coming out with WiFi enabled devices I was expecting to hear something soon from Sansaire and I wasn't disappointed. The first thing that jumps out about the new unit is the unique design they decided on. Instead of the typical "stick" circulator, they went with a cool looking Δ shape. They say the end footprint of the circulator is smaller than the original Sansaire so hopefully it doesn't take up too much room in the pot.

I also liked that the control panel has been moved to the front. This takes it out of the way of steam from the pot (some other brands have been known to short circuit due to steam) and making it easier to reach and change the settings on.

With WiFi becoming available on the latest version of many sous vide machines, the important question is, "Do I need to have WiFi on my sous vide machine?" This article will help you answer that question. You may decide that having WiFi on your sous vide machine would be a "nice to have" but you don't envision that you would use it often. Or you may determine that WiFi is a "must-have" to simplify your life as a sous vide cook.

I recently had the great pleasure of covering and attending the StarChesf 2016 Internation Chefs Congress in Brooklyn as part of the press. It's the second time I've been to StarChefs and every time is an inspriational experience. It always has some of the best chefs in the world, amazing panels and incredible workshops.

The theme this year was "What is Progress" and focused on "Defining success in an age of inlfuence and opportunity". It was a very inspiration conference and several people that are making a big difference in their communities were speakers. I highly recommend attending the conference if you are in the food industry in any capacity.

There's too much going on at the conference, but here's some of the highlights I had.

There are two ways to cook sous vide, one is based on the thickness of the food and the other is based on the desired tenderness. When cooking based on the thickness of the food it is helpful to have a reference guide to fall back on. I've combined several of the respectable sous vide time and temperature charts into one easy-to-use reference.

Cooking based on thickness is how PolyScience, Baldwin, and Nathan started out as they did research on food safety. Cooking sous vide based on thickness basically tells you the minimum time you can cook a piece of meat to ensure it is safe and comes up to temperature in the middle. It doesn't take into account tenderizing time or any other factors. It's often used by restaurants or home cooks who want to minimize cooking time and are using tender cuts of meat that don't need the tenderization.

On this website, as well as other places online such as the sous vide subreddit, there are often questions regarding the power consumption of sous vide cooking. Questions like the following:

How much power is used for a typical sous vide cook?

How much impact does the water bath insulation have on sous vide power usage?

How do water ovens compare to sous vide immersion circulators on power usage?

Is sous vide power usage something that we really need to be concerned about?

Motivated by this and our own curiosity, we decided to define and run a Sous Vide Power Consumption Benchmark to gather some empirical data on this interesting topic. Hopefully, this article will answer some of the questions you have regarding power usage during sous vide cooking.

Viewed from a high-level perspective, as meat is heated the components that make it up change. These changes result in structural transformations that affect the texture, juiciness, and mouthfeel of the meat. The higher the temperature of the heat applied to the meat, the faster these changes happen.

Here is a more detailed look at the process.

Raw meat is generally squishy, chewy, and full of moisture.

At 120°F (48.9°C) meat slowly begins to tenderize as the protein myosin begins to coagulate and the connective tissue in the meat begins to break down. This also causes the meat to firm up as the protein contracts. As the temperature increases so does the speed of tenderization.

This is the first of a number of vacuum sealer reviews we will be doing in the months ahead. This one is particularly exciting since it is on a chamber vacuum sealer - the PolyScience 300 Series Chamber Vacuum Sealer. This unit has nearly unlimited uses for both food storage and food preparation, especially for modernist cooking techniques such as sous vide and infusion.

We were quite fortunate to have PolyScience Culinary provide us with their 300 Series Chamber Vacuum Sealer for this review. They characterize this Vacuum Sealer as a "Maintenance-free design which provides professional-level features at a home cook's price." The short 2 minute video below will give you a quick introduction to the PolyScience unit.

Some sous vide recipes say you should boil your meat before you seal it, what is that about? I thought the point of sous viding it was to keep it at a lower temperature, definitely not boiling it. I heard it has something to do with killing bacteria, but doesn't sous vide do that anyway?

Thanks - Jackson

Thanks for the question! There's a few different things going on here and I'll try to address them all.

First off, the boiling is usually done to kill "lactobacillus", a type of bacteria that actually thrives in the lower temperature range of sous vide cooking. This bacteria isn't harmful to you, it's actually the same kind that is used a lot when making cheese and yogurt. However, it does tend to smell bad, so your food can have a funky or "bad cheese" smell to it. It can also cause your bag to puff up which can affect the transfer of heat.

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